Hamlet (director and star Bruce Ramsay) contemplates his bleak future in streamlined version of the Bard
HAMLET (Bruce Ramsay, 2011)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, January 10
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
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Director and star Bruce Ramsay strips down and condenses the Bard in his 1940s-set noirish update of Hamlet, but in doing so he also drains one of Shakespeare’s most powerful tragedies of all its poetry and emotion. Trimming the tale down to a far-too-lean eighty-seven minutes, Ramsay cuts out characters and reinterprets scenes to focus on the family-related aspects of the story of betrayal, madness, murder, and revenge, using the original text for the most part while setting the entire film in one large house (actually the University Women’s Club in Vancouver). He fills the cast with veterans of Canada’s Bard on the Beach series, including Gillian Barber as Gertrude, Duncan Fraser as Polonius, Haig Sutherland as Laertes, Martin Sims as Guildenstern, Russell Roberts as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Lara Gilchrist as Ophelia; Welsh actor Peter Wingfield plays Claudius, with Stephen Lobo as Horatio and Bret Stait as Rosencrantz. The bare-bones film was shot in three days (for a mere — and rather admirable — $27,000), but it’s taken nearly three years for it to get a U.S. theatrical release, and it’s easy to see why. Ramsay’s Hamlet is more like a failed episode of Masterpiece Theatre, sort of Agatha Christie meets Downton Abbey in postwar London, than a fresh new look at the extremely familiar play, though it is a noble attempt. Indeed, “I must be cruel to be kind. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.” Hamlet opens at Cinema Village on January 10, with Ramsay taking part in Q&As following the 7:10 screenings on Friday and Saturday night.